The Night Stalker: The Life and Crimes of Richard Ramirez

Decades after Richard Ramirez left 13 dead and paralyzed the city of Los Angeles, his name is still synonymous with fear, torture, and sadistic murder. Philip Carlo's classic The Night Stalker, based on years of meticulous research and extensive interviews with Ramirez, revealed the killer and his horrifying crimes to be even more chilling than anyone could have imagined. The story of Ramirez is a bizarre and spellbinding descent into the very heart of human evil.

Too Pretty to Live: The Catfishing Murders of East Tennessee

When Bill Payne and Billie Jean Hayworth began their romance, they unknowingly set in motion a diabolical plot that would end with them murdered in their own home, Hayworth holding their mercifully unharmed infant. Chris was a CIA agent who was concerned about Jenelle. Seeing the cyberbullying she had endured, and worried for her safety, Chris got in touch with Jenelle's protective parents and her devoted boyfriend, warning them that Payne and Hayworth were a danger to Jenelle.

Murder in the Family

On March 15th, 1987 police in Anchorage, Alaska arrived at a horrific scene of carnage. In a modest downtown apartment, they found Nancy Newman's brutally beaten corpse sprawled across her bed. In other rooms were the bodies of her eight-year-old daughter, Melissa, and her three-year-old, Angie, whose throat was slit from ear to ear. Both Nancy and Melissa had been sexually assaulted.

House of Horrors: The Shocking True Story of Anthony Sowell, the Cleveland Strangler

To his neighbors, Anthony Sowell was a friendly and helpful former Marine. But they didn't know about his dark side - or the gruesome secret inside his house. Sowell's secret life was revealed to the nation on October 29, 2009, when a Cleveland Police SWAT team entered his house to arrest him for an alleged rape. They didn't find Sowell, but they encountered a nightmarish scene: two decomposed bodies in his third-floor living room. Eight more bodies were hidden throughout the house and buried in the back yard.

Who Killed These Girls?: Cold Case: The Yogurt Shop Murders

The facts are brutally straightforward. On December 6, 1991, the naked, bound and gagged bodies of four girls - each one shot in the head - were found in an I Can't Believe It's Yogurt! shop in Austin, Texas. Grief, shock, and horror spread out from their families and friends to overtake the city itself. Though all branches of law enforcement were brought to bear, the investigation was often misdirected, and after eight years only two men (then teenagers) were tried.

Blood Echoes: The Infamous Alday Mass Murder and Its Aftermath

It was not a clever killing. On May 5, 1973, three men escaped from a Maryland prison and disappeared. Joined by a 15-year-old brother, they surfaced in Georgia, where they were spotted joyriding in a stolen car. Within a week, the four young men were arrested on suspicion of committing one of the most horrific murders in American history. Jerry Alday and his family were eating Sunday dinner when death burst through the door of their cozy little trailer. Their six bodies are only the beginning of this gruesome story.

Such Good Boys: The True Story of a Mother, Two Sons and a Horrifying Murder

Raised in the suburb of Riverside, California, 20-year-old college student Jason Bautista endured for years his emotionally disturbed mother's verbal and psychological abuse. She even locked him out of the house, tied him up with electrical cord, and on one occasion, gave him a beating that sent him to the emergency room. On the night of January 14, 2003, Jason strangled his mother. To keep authorities from identifying her body, he chopped off her head and hands, an idea he claimed he got from watching an episode of the hit TV series The Sopranos.

Possessed: The Infamous Texas Stiletto Murder

The officer responding to a 911 call at one of Houston's hippest high-rises expected the worst. After all, domestic violence situations can be unpredictable. But nothing could've prepared him for what he found: a beautiful woman drenched in blood, an older man lying dead on the floor, and a cobalt blue suede stiletto with tufts of white hair stuck to its five-and-a-half-inch heel.

Prisoners of Fear

Recounts the true story of Connie Krauser Chaney, who left behind a tragic childhood to marry Wayne, unaware of his violent tendencies, and describes how she eventually fled with her young son, only to be stalked and killed.

Against Her Will: Pinnacle True Crime

Richard and Victoria Tinyes feared the worst when their thirteen year old daughter Kelly Ann vanished from their quiet suburban community of Valley Stream, New York, on March 3, 1999. But the nightmare to come was worse than they could ever imagine. Only five doors away, in the home of John and Elizabeth Golub, police found Kelly Ann's body stuffed in a plastic garbage bag. She'd been brutally beaten, stabbed, strangled, and mutilated. After weeks of intense investigation, police arrested the Golubs twenty-one-year-old son, Robert - a reclusive young man obsessed with bodybuilding and given to fits of rage. The sensational trial and subsequent conviction of Robert Golub shocked the nation and tore the once peaceful community apart. Neighbors took sides. So did the media. And no one who lived on Horton Road would ever be the same. Note on audio book: Except for the beginning and end of the book, there is no longer any music.

A Killer Among Us

On March 16, 1992, Elizabeth DeCaro, a 28 year-old mother of four, was found dead in her own home, murdered execution-style with two bullets to the head. Her husband, Rick, was immediately a suspect, having previously struck her "accidentally" with the family van after taking out a $100,000 life insurance policy on her. A Killer Among Us presents the true shocking story of Elizabeth's family and their search for justice against the man who continued to play father to the children whose mother he had killed.

Rough Trade: A Shocking True Story of Prostitution, Murder, and Redemption

Early one morning in May, 1997, a young couple in the mountains of Colorado spotted a man dragging a body up a secluded trail. The man fled, leaving behind a bloody, dying woman. The investigation into the death of young street-walker Anita Paley would lead from that idyllic spot to the seamy underbelly of Denver and a world of prostitution, drug dealers, and violent criminals. And it would expose the lives of suspect Robert Riggan and Anita's friend Joanne Cordova, a former cop-turned-crack-addict and hooker.

The Want Ad Killer

After his first grisly crime, Harvey Louis Carignan beat a death sentence and continued to manipulate, rape, and bludgeon women to death - using want ads to lure his young female victims. And time after time, justice was thwarted by a killer whose twisted legal genius was matched only by his sick savagery. Here, complete with the testimony of women who suffered his unspeakable sexual abuses and barely escaped with their lives and of the police who at last put him behind bars, is one of the most shattering and thought-provoking true-crime stories of our time.

Devil in the Darkness: The True Story of Serial Killer Israel Keyes

He was a hard-working small business owner, an Army veteran, an attentive lover, and a doting father. But he was also something more, something sinister. A master of deception, he was a rapist, arsonist, and bank robber, and a new breed of serial killer, one who studied other killers to perfect his craft. He methodically buried kill-kits containing his tools of murder years before returning to reclaim them.

Isadore's Secret: Sin, Murder, and Confession in a Northern Michigan Town

This true story was the basis for the Broadway play, The Runner Stumbles, and the movie of the same name. In 1907, a Felician nun disappeared from her rural convent. When her bones were found buried in the dirt-floored basement of the remote, Gothic church she served, it caused a national sensation. Who killed her? The handsome priest? The jealous housekeeper? And, what other secret was uncovered along with her bones?

Bitter Remains: A Custody Battle, a Gruesome Crime, and the Mother Who Paid the Ultimate Price

On July 13, 2011, Laura Jean Ackerson of Kinston, North Carolina, went to pick up her two toddler sons. It would be the last time she was seen alive. Laura's ex, Grant Hayes - the father of her two sons - and his wife, Amanda, the mother of his newborn daughter, both pointed the finger at each other as the one guilty of murdering Laura, cutting up her body, and then transporting and disposing of the remains on the shores of Oyster Creek, Texas.

My Sweet Angel: The True Story of Lacey Spears, the Seemingly Perfect Mother Who Murdered Her Son in Cold Blood

Lacey Spears made international headlines in January 2015, when she was charged with the "depraved mind" murder of her five-year-old son, Garnett. Prosecutors alleged that the 27-year-old mother had poisoned him with high concentrations of salt through his stomach tube. To the outside world, Lacey had seemed like the perfect mother, regularly posting dramatic updates on her son's harrowing medical problems. But in reality, Lacey was a textbook case of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy.

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Former social worker S. R. Reynolds has never forgotten the mishandled case of 15-year-old Michelle Anderson, a vibrant beauty who went missing from Reynolds' Knoxville, Tennessee, neighborhood years earlier. Aided by her old professor, famed forensic anthropologist Dr. Bill Bass, Reynolds picks up the trail of this cold case. As she presses neglected pieces of the puzzle into place, Reynolds unearths a string of heinous kidnappings and rapes across the South, crimes that span decades.

Poisoned Love

On November 6, 2000, paramedics answered a call to find Kristin Rossum sobbing. Her husband, Greg de Villers, wasn't breathing, and she claimed he had overdosed on drugs after learning that she was leaving him. But family and friends weren't buying Kristin's story - particularly the idea that Greg would take his own life. The daughter of a well-to-do California family, Rossum was a brainy blonde beauty whose talent for toxicology had won her a post at the San Diego County Medical Examiner's Office. But her sweet smile masked a dark side.

Let's Kill Mom: Four Texas Teens and a Horrifying Murder Pact

In September, 2008, Roanoke, Texas, police discovered a house of horrors: poisoned pudding, a bathtub set up for electrocution, a bloody butcher knife, and a hank of chopped-off hair. The worst was yet to come. Days before, 17-year-old Jennifer Bailey, her 13-year-old brother David, and their friends Paul Henson and Merrilee White had made a gruesome pact: they'd kill their parents, steal their cars and credit cards, and flee to Canada. Paul and Merrilee's parents thwarted their fates, but Jennifer and David's mother Susan Bailey wasn't so lucky.

Dance with the Devil: A Memoir of Murder and Loss

In November 2001, the body of a young doctor named Andrew Bagby was discovered in Keystone State Park outside Latrobe, Pennsylvania, five bullet wounds in his face, chest, buttocks, and the back of the head. For parents Dave and Kate, the pain was unbearable? But Andrew's murder was only the first in a string of tragic events.

3,096 Days in Captivity: The True Story of My Abduction, Eight Years of Enslavement, and Escape

On March 2, 1998, 10-year-old Natascha Kampusch was kidnapped and found herself locked in a house that would be her home for the next eight years. She was starved, beaten, treated as a slave, and forced to work for her deranged captor. But she never forgot who she was, and she never gave up hope of returning to the world. This is her story.

Failure of Justice: A Brutal Murder, an Obsessed Cop, Six Wrongful Convictions

Everyone felt the same way: Small-town Nebraska widow Helen Wilson didn't have an ounce of meanness in her body. Then, on February 5, 1985, one of the coldest nights on record, the unthinkable happened. The 68-year-old resident was murdered inside her second-floor apartment. But why?

Publisher's Summary

A gut-wrenching true-crime account of a couple on a twisted killing spree in the American South.

Evil has a way of finding itself. How else could you explain the bond between Alvin and Judith Ann Neelley, who consecrated their marriage in blood? Before the killings started, they restricted themselves to simple mischief: prank calls, vandalism, firing guns at strangers’ houses. Gradually their ambition grew, until one day at the Riverbend Mall in Rome, Georgia, they spotted Lisa Ann Millican.

Three days after Lisa Ann disappeared, the 13-year-old girl was found shot and pumped full of liquid drain cleaner. In between her abduction and her death, she was subjected to innumerable horrors. And she was only the first to die.

Drawing on police records and extensive interviews, Thomas H. Cook recounts the story of Judith Ann Neelley, who at 19 became the youngest woman ever sentenced to death row.

The narrator didn't detract. Did the best he could with the material he had to work with. If anything he could of pronounced the names of the towns in Georgia correctly. Did pretty good but it was a downfall. I kind of liked how the narrator tried to use the southern accent and overall he did good but at times made the southern accent sound ignorant. No easy task so I can't hold him resonsbile for that. The author killed it before the narrator got it.

If you could play editor, what scene or scenes would you have cut from Early Graves?

I would of given the manuscript back to the author and told Mr. Cook to destroy it. This could of been a much better story. But it was just the same thing, over and over. Distracting. Boring. Trying to give the victims the respect of finishing their story but it sure is hard.

Any additional comments?

Don't waste a precious credit. Thank you to Audible for their generous return policy.

A very horrific couple of murders committed by this serial killer couple, written in a classic true crime style. I definitely enjoyed this book, however I was left wondering why the author chose to focus almost exclusively on the female of the pair, Judith Neelly. I think its possible that she played a very important role in the murders as the author has presented, but I was left wondering about her husband's part. I take it that the evidence of his guilt was not straight forward, but I would have rather heard the author's discussion of his life and crimes, and what part he may have played, rather than focusing exclusively on her guilt. Even so, the author presents a convincing story about Judith Neelly's culpability